


Conflagration

by april_rainer (tom_bedlam)



Category: The Cremation of Sam McGee - Robert Service
Genre: Canonical Character Death, M/M, Non-Canonical Character Death, is it death or is it conversion to cryptid?, maybe? - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:41:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28230057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tom_bedlam/pseuds/april_rainer
Summary: In the years after he takes Sam McGee on the Christmas mail run to Whitehorse, the narrator dreams of what might have been -- and what might still be.
Relationships: Sam McGee/Narrator
Comments: 11
Kudos: 19
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Conflagration

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sybilius](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sybilius/gifts).



> I was also baffled and delighted to see this on the taglist, but I've loved the poem since childhood! I had fun writing this and I hope it works for you!

Sam was soft, even after a winter up North, with soft muddy coloured hair and soft eyes like the stubborn snow after the break-up. He shouldn't have come to the Klondike in the first place, and he definitely shouldn't have tried to stick it out on Judd's claim through the winter but the gold fever had got him good and he was determined not to go home until he could take his fortune in gold dust back to the folks he'd left behind. I couldn't argue that; gold fever got me before it was fashionable but I'd got bit extra hard. There isn't anyone left at home that misses me, and I haven't struck paydirt yet.

I told him I'd give him a lift in to Dawson City. I should have left him there, to try his luck in the dance halls or the shops. But there weren't jobs in Dawson that winter, packed with tenderfoots already and more still pouring in. So I took him with me on the mail run, telling myself it was good to have a pal on that kind of trip. If anything happened, he'd see that the dogs didn't starve, anyway. It didn't have nothing to do with the soft way he held Mrs. Harrison's baby, nor how he gave the handful of Judd's dust he'd managed to earn to a scrawny kid wouldn't even survive the winter, like as not.

We camped on the trail when we had to, the roadhouses overflowing with would-be miners, or when the best route for dogs wasn't the main road. The snow was blowing when we reached Lake Laberge, and we set up the tent in lee of the banks. Not so cold, I thought, before Sam started in on how the cold didn't ever leave him be. He talked about the cotton fields, warm and soft and blowing white in the autumn sun -- an autumn not so long past way down South. I didn't know what to say to that. Endless fields of blowing white don't sound warm to me; it sounds like the snow blowing across a lake, beautiful in its way, but eery and dangerous too. But I haven't been Outside in near a decade; what do I know about normal folks lives? I couldn't offer Sam anything he needed, anything he'd value, but we curled together in my furs. There are more ways than one to warm a man up.

I dream of it, sometimes. The Christmas Eve a week out of Whitehorse, when Sam touched my face with a hand that was still soft under all the calluses. He didn't say anything then, not in my memories. But in dreams he says more -- talks the way he sometimes did up at 8 Below when the whisky went round and we started in on tales and songs. Sam didn't have any good stories -- he'd come up by steamer in the fall with about a thousand others -- but he'd learned off all kinds of poetry as a kid in school and in the right mood he'd recite it by the hour. He talks like that in my dreams, flowery words and soft sounds and a rhythm that goes on and on like the chinook across the tundra, pressing kisses to my neck and wrapped warm around me. It wasn't that warm, that time in reality. Maybe if we'd gotten to know one another in the heat of the summer, or down in his beloved South. But then -- we shouldn't have met anywhere else, me being me and him as soft as he was. But here, we're all Outsiders together, and I was allowed to smile at man like Sam and my dream-Sam was allowed to touch a man like me. Up on the creeks, Sam complained of the cold more than anyone we knew but that night his hands and feet were cold as ice whenever they touched me so I guess he had reason. I wanted to keep hold of his hands, rubbing them warm with my rough ones, but couldn't imagine it was the sort of thing he'd want. In my dreams it's him is warming me up, the creature of generous warmth God intended him to be.

I left the old wreck blazing after seeing Sam there. I had a sleigh full of Christmas letters for families Outside and the straight wind wouldn't keep up forever. I wanted to be across the lake before the weather changed and I guessed there was nothing left to be done at that point. The tall tales told by the fire were nothing like that blaze, so strong the air around it wavered, and yet there Sam sat, a creature of light and fire crowned on his throne. It's an uncertain trip across the lake no matter what and the dogs were jumpy. But I stopped to look back twice, and as far as I could see, the Alice May was burning cheerfully on even though it was too cold and the fuel was too scare. Even when I should have been out of view, the Northern Lights were blazing orange and gold that Christmas Day and you'd never know it wasn't that all the heavens were on fire.

I've dreamt of Sam every night this trip. Haven't been back to Lake Laberge since that Christmas, but the weather's like it was in '99 this year. Ice to the West might be rotten. And I wonder, if I go by the Alice May, will it still be burning merrily? If I open the door, will Sam McGee invite me inside, hot as the Tennessee summer, and let me kiss his soft lips until we're both senseless?

_  
Klondike News, August 1901_

_Christmas Courier Lost On Trail_

_We regret that Mr. J. Bouyer, that miner's Saint Nicholas so beloved of our young fry, has not as we all so dearly hoped, been wintering at Whitehorse or Dawson, and the editors are forced to assume that he was lost near the North shore of Lake Lebarge this past winter. Speculators out of Bennett found his sled, the mail miraculously preserved, but with no trace of the owner. Mr. Bouyer, a native of St. Catherines, Ontario, has been living in the Klondike region since before Mr. Carmacks' grand discovery at Bonanza Creek, and was known for his tall tales of the North and mushing long trips in the darkest days of the year.  
_

**Author's Note:**

> Personally, I believe Sam and the narrator live cryptidly ever after, but other interpretations are equally valid.


End file.
